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Hello Forums! I am currently gathering a team together to start work on a MMO project called Era Online and am gathering information on what we will need to do/ obtain and one of those things is character customization. If anyone can tell me what all is needed to make this and put it into the game, I would greatly appreciated. Also this is not intended to be a recruiting topic but if anyone is interested and wants to know more about the game, pm me or email me at blink.riddle@gmail.com. Please do not respond to this invitation on this thread as that is not the point of this topic.

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There are several options to implement customization of a character.
1. Morph/Blendtargets: Two or more meshes could be blended/morphed , often used for faces. I.e. you model two noses, a big and a tiny one, the player could then use a controller to choose the appearance between big and tiny.
2. Texture: a simple and old approach is to just change the skin of a character or parts of it (nowaday used for tatoos etc.).
3. Bindpoint: when rigging a character you could add more bones for special purposes to bind other models to these points. I.e. weapons, helms etc. Only really usable if you have fix models which don't need to bend with the character.
4. Modular meshes: Armor etc. which will bend with the character need to be modelled as own mesh and could not be just attached like a helm or weapon(else you get artifacts like skin penetrating the armor etc.). To get it right you need to subdivide your character into modules like arms,legs,body,head etc. The game needs to combine this modules into a single mesh.

Well, the skin(2) and bindpoint(3) approach are quite cheap. Blendtargets and modular meshes are lot of work, the artists need to work really carefully to get a modular setup right (seams, animation, vertex weights etc.). In this case you will need a powerful tool to enable the modification of a mesh. Once in game it is quite easy to render it. A face which will be constructed from 20 blendtargets could be precalculated, a modular mesh could be precalculated or rendered as batch of all components.

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There are several options to implement customization of a character.
1. Morph/Blendtargets: Two or more meshes could be blended/morphed , often used for faces. I.e. you model two noses, a big and a tiny one, the player could then use a controller to choose the appearance between big and tiny.
2. Texture: a simple and old approach is to just change the skin of a character or parts of it (nowaday used for tatoos etc.).
3. Bindpoint: when rigging a character you could add more bones for special purposes to bind other models to these points. I.e. weapons, helms etc. Only really usable if you have fix models which don't need to bend with the character.
4. Modular meshes: Armor etc. which will bend with the character need to be modelled as own mesh and could not be just attached like a helm or weapon(else you get artifacts like skin penetrating the armor etc.). To get it right you need to subdivide your character into modules like arms,legs,body,head etc. The game needs to combine this modules into a single mesh.

Well, the skin(2) and bindpoint(3) approach are quite cheap. Blendtargets and modular meshes are lot of work, the artists need to work really carefully to get a modular setup right (seams, animation, vertex weights etc.). In this case you will need a powerful tool to enable the modification of a mesh. Once in game it is quite easy to render it. A face which will be constructed from 20 blendtargets could be precalculated, a modular mesh could be precalculated or rendered as batch of all components.